Murmurs of the Earth

Four Hundred and Ninety-Six days.

One year, four months, one week, and two days since all hell broke loose.

Eleven thousand, nine hundred and four hours since civilization as we knew it collapsed.

My name is Maverick Weston, and I'm a Private First Class in the United States Army.  Or, what's left of it, anyway.

I'm the lowest ranking survivor among my two superiors: Corporal Alejandro Ramirez and Staff Sergeant Avery Hawkins.

We've been traveling across the country from California, where we were previously stationed after being pulled from Iraq, to Washington D.C. in search of some way out of this god damned country, or at least some way to contact the outside world to see if the virus has breached the continent.

I kind of want to laugh at how this whole mess started, until the Staff Sergeant orders me to stay silent.  You see, the whole world was in an uproar over the creation of a new super cure that had been developed to combat cancer and AIDs.

Well, lo and behold, it worked.  Slowly, but it fucking worked.

The scientific community was astounded and busy congratulating each other on a job well done while some "old age ideal" folks all around the world were yelling their heads off about how wrong it is to want to stop God's work.

Seriously?

Well, things got so bad that a few deployments got redirected from the Middle East back into the states to deal with the rioting and such that had the local police force overwhelmed.

It was only a few weeks after that, when people started getting incredibly violent and murderous, that some troops were pulled out of the Middle East.

Only a few days after that, Martial Law was in effect and most of us had no idea what was really going on until it was too late.

You see, the super cure didn't really cure.  Sure, it learned to destroy the AIDs and cancer cells, but did it stop there?  Nope.  It went on to "correct" any deformity that it detected.  Being that its host was an imperfect being, you can see what happened.

But, after that... I have no fucking idea.  It's like the "cure" developed a mind of its own, or maybe the egg heads developed it like that, and it started reanimating its hosts to stay alive.  It rewrote its own... Directives?  I think, to stop destroying the body and begin trying to rebuild it.  Of course, by that point, it had almost nothing to work with, so it had to start from scratch with things like finding food and water.

You can guess what turned out to be food.

You may be wondering how a lowly little Private like myself knows these things, and the answer is simple: I read a lot, and there's been plenty to read as we marched across the country while searching airports and docks for some way out of this hellhole.

It's shocking how reckless people are in the face of danger and chaos.

I can't tell you how many times we've been so close to freedom, only to discover our escape is blocked by destroyed machinery or cut wiring.